Martinangeli, Andrea F.M.Povitkina, MarinaJagers, Sverker C.Rothstein, Bo2020-12-182020-12-182020-121653-8919http://hdl.handle.net/2077/67203Social trust is a crucial ingredient for successful collective action. What causes social trust to develop, however, remains poorly understood. The quality of political institutions has been proposed as a candidate driver and has been shown to correlate with social trust. We show that this relationship is causal. We begin by documenting a positive correlation between quality of institutions, measured by embezzlement, and social trust using survey data. We then take the investigation to the laboratory: We rst exogenously expose subjects to di erent levels of institutional quality in an environment mimicking public administration embezzlement. We then measure social trust among the participants using a trust game. Coherent with our survey evidence, individuals exposed to low institutional quality trust signi cantly lessengText